5 ms·

To say nothing of the inherent advantages of immortality and self modification.

knughit 11y ago
Humanity is also immortal and self-modifying, it uses human bodies as the unit of program transfer and modification. Humanity's version is extremely slow, of course, and limited in quantity and quality of copies of a good program.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Indeed. And see how far we've managed to get after we've figured out a good way to pass learned knowledge around.
  - otakucode 11y ago
    To be fair, we do have quite a handicap in that respect. A machine intelligence could, at least theoretically, pass around perfect copies of its learned knowledge near-instantly (maybe not though... integrating two neural networks that developed separately might be terribly difficult or even impossible... I wonder if anyone has attempted or studied this? If NNA learns to recognize human faces, and NNB learns to recognize text, is there a way to merge them? It's not like you can just average their weights together, especially if using a method that connects/prunes neurons as necessary). Humans, on the other hand, have to translate bioelectrochemical patterns created in very differently structured networks into flapping of a meat strip rhythmically to cause air vibrations that will rumble a thin membrane of meat, feeding electrical impulses into the differing network, and its success depends upon an expansive, and almost completely unknown (to us), body of similar, but not identical, experiences, from hearing the same patterns of sounds while seeing objects or pictures of objects, possibly decades earlier, to accepting unspoken social cues early in development. What is astonishing is that language works at all. It really, really sounds like it shouldn't have a snowballs chance in Hell. And the weird thing is, I've got this niggling suspicion that this handicap is actually a profound strength. That evolution didn't produce so many species of organisms separated by walls of flesh and bone, detached from one another and capable of wandering far apart, then incapable of even expressing fundamentally novel concepts (I mean novel novel, such that your language has no word for it and such that any metaphor would be more misleading than enlightening). We could have evolved such that when holding hands, a flow of specially produced chemicals seep from ones hand to the other, travelling to the brain and making the changes necessary to convey concepts exactly. Bacteria communicate in this way. They change each other. Directly. We could to. But... we don't. And there is maybe a reason for that.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      > But... we don't. And there is maybe a reason for that. There's a rather good argument that as a species, we're the stupidest thing nature could get away with that could still develop writing and science. So the reason may very well be that nature didn't bother.
- jjaredsimpson 11y ago
  Humanity isn't an actor with a will. It doesn't "do" anything. I was referencing the superiority of AI minds to biological minds. Humanity not a thing which possesses a mind.
  - ajuc 11y ago
    How would you know as a lowly neuron?
  - adrianN 11y ago
    In the same way a neuron is not something that possesses a mind, yet a suitably arranged collection of them suddenly does, I think one could argue that humanity is an actor with a will.
    - jjaredsimpson 11y ago
      That's not the same thing at all. Neurons do not possess a mind, yet a collection does. Humans do possess minds, and a collection of them does not. You can't use the first statement to support the opposite of the second statement because the premise is dissimilar.
drdeca 11y ago
AI bound to a bounded volume are not immortal. By the Bekenstein bound; they would eventually run out of states to be in, so the total length of their experiences (if they have any) would be finite. Humanity cannot conquer death. Of course, the number of possible states is very very large, so, extremely long lived, sure. But not immortal, unless expanding without end.
- meric 11y ago
  They can repeat states.
  - drdeca 11y ago
    Well, physically, yes. But as far as subjective experience goes, repeating states would not contribute to the total length of the subjective experiences. There is no way to distinguish whether the period of time between 5 and 10 seconds ago repeated exactly the same way a billion times before continuing or not. One assumes it didn't, but if it did, it wouldn't really matter that it did. So for other things, it might be relevant that it continues to exist and repeats states, and it might even be worthwhile for it to make decisions while keeping in mind the fact that its decision might be at many different times (due to repeated states). But the length of its life internally viewed would still be finite, just with parts of it possibly having expression in infinitely many times of the external world. As an absurd thought experiment, suppose that an entity arrives from the future, over the course of a year, builds a time machine, and then uses it to go back in time to become when it originally arrived. (as a bootstrap paradox sort of thing.) Would you say that the extent of the entities life is ~1 year, or infinite? There isn't any point in the cycle where it ends, but one wouldn't say that circles are infinitely long line segments, just because they don't have an end.
    - meric 11y ago
      It wasn't specified anything was required of its subjective experience, the only requirement was for it to be immortal. There's a jellyfish on earth that is also immortal[1]; when it's hurt or sick, it can revert to the polyp stage - it's cells would transform, and it grow back into jellyfish with a new body. This process can repeat indefinitely. Each time it does this, it is likely it has a new set of subjective experience, but at the same time, the distinct set of subjective experiences are experienced by the same biological body of cells. If a biological being can be immortal this way, why can't AI's? Humanity cannot conquer death, but this does not take away the immortality of living beings that already exist in our world. Take a look at this 80,000 year old trees[3]. It's one living being in multiple trees with a single root system connecting all the trees into one being. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_dohrnii https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_dohrnii [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest-living_organisms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest-living_organis... [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)

Humanity is also immortal and self-modifying, it uses human bodies as the unit of program transfer and modification. Humanity's version is extremely slow, of course, and limited in quantity and quality of copies of a good program.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Indeed. And see how far we've managed to get after we've figured out a good way to pass learned knowledge around.
- otakucode 11y ago
  To be fair, we do have quite a handicap in that respect. A machine intelligence could, at least theoretically, pass around perfect copies of its learned knowledge near-instantly (maybe not though... integrating two neural networks that developed separately might be terribly difficult or even impossible... I wonder if anyone has attempted or studied this? If NNA learns to recognize human faces, and NNB learns to recognize text, is there a way to merge them? It's not like you can just average their weights together, especially if using a method that connects/prunes neurons as necessary). Humans, on the other hand, have to translate bioelectrochemical patterns created in very differently structured networks into flapping of a meat strip rhythmically to cause air vibrations that will rumble a thin membrane of meat, feeding electrical impulses into the differing network, and its success depends upon an expansive, and almost completely unknown (to us), body of similar, but not identical, experiences, from hearing the same patterns of sounds while seeing objects or pictures of objects, possibly decades earlier, to accepting unspoken social cues early in development. What is astonishing is that language works at all. It really, really sounds like it shouldn't have a snowballs chance in Hell. And the weird thing is, I've got this niggling suspicion that this handicap is actually a profound strength. That evolution didn't produce so many species of organisms separated by walls of flesh and bone, detached from one another and capable of wandering far apart, then incapable of even expressing fundamentally novel concepts (I mean novel novel, such that your language has no word for it and such that any metaphor would be more misleading than enlightening). We could have evolved such that when holding hands, a flow of specially produced chemicals seep from ones hand to the other, travelling to the brain and making the changes necessary to convey concepts exactly. Bacteria communicate in this way. They change each other. Directly. We could to. But... we don't. And there is maybe a reason for that.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    > But... we don't. And there is maybe a reason for that. There's a rather good argument that as a species, we're the stupidest thing nature could get away with that could still develop writing and science. So the reason may very well be that nature didn't bother.
jjaredsimpson 11y ago
Humanity isn't an actor with a will. It doesn't "do" anything. I was referencing the superiority of AI minds to biological minds. Humanity not a thing which possesses a mind.
- ajuc 11y ago
  How would you know as a lowly neuron?
- adrianN 11y ago
  In the same way a neuron is not something that possesses a mind, yet a suitably arranged collection of them suddenly does, I think one could argue that humanity is an actor with a will.
  - jjaredsimpson 11y ago
    That's not the same thing at all. Neurons do not possess a mind, yet a collection does. Humans do possess minds, and a collection of them does not. You can't use the first statement to support the opposite of the second statement because the premise is dissimilar.

drdeca 11y ago

AI bound to a bounded volume are not immortal. By the Bekenstein bound; they would eventually run out of states to be in, so the total length of their experiences (if they have any) would be finite. Humanity cannot conquer death. Of course, the number of possible states is very very large, so, extremely long lived, sure. But not immortal, unless expanding without end.

meric 11y ago
They can repeat states.
- drdeca 11y ago
  Well, physically, yes. But as far as subjective experience goes, repeating states would not contribute to the total length of the subjective experiences. There is no way to distinguish whether the period of time between 5 and 10 seconds ago repeated exactly the same way a billion times before continuing or not. One assumes it didn't, but if it did, it wouldn't really matter that it did. So for other things, it might be relevant that it continues to exist and repeats states, and it might even be worthwhile for it to make decisions while keeping in mind the fact that its decision might be at many different times (due to repeated states). But the length of its life internally viewed would still be finite, just with parts of it possibly having expression in infinitely many times of the external world. As an absurd thought experiment, suppose that an entity arrives from the future, over the course of a year, builds a time machine, and then uses it to go back in time to become when it originally arrived. (as a bootstrap paradox sort of thing.) Would you say that the extent of the entities life is ~1 year, or infinite? There isn't any point in the cycle where it ends, but one wouldn't say that circles are infinitely long line segments, just because they don't have an end.
  - meric 11y ago
    It wasn't specified anything was required of its subjective experience, the only requirement was for it to be immortal. There's a jellyfish on earth that is also immortal[1]; when it's hurt or sick, it can revert to the polyp stage - it's cells would transform, and it grow back into jellyfish with a new body. This process can repeat indefinitely. Each time it does this, it is likely it has a new set of subjective experience, but at the same time, the distinct set of subjective experiences are experienced by the same biological body of cells. If a biological being can be immortal this way, why can't AI's? Humanity cannot conquer death, but this does not take away the immortality of living beings that already exist in our world. Take a look at this 80,000 year old trees[3]. It's one living being in multiple trees with a single root system connecting all the trees into one being. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_dohrnii https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_dohrnii [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest-living_organisms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest-living_organis... [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)